Site Mobile Navigation

A Catholic School Meets a Challenge

The production last weekend was undertaken by Eric Ostrow, above, a drama teacher. It was the second time the play had been produced at the school.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

When Eric Ostrow was hired last year to teach drama at Xavier High School in Manhattan, as a newcomer he chose two impeccably innocuous shows for student productions. The first was a comedy, “Epic Proportions,” and then came the musical “Grease,” with its script scrubbed of profanity and one character’s unwed pregnancy papered over in euphemisms.

Then, late last spring, Mr. Ostrow presented school administrators with his wish list for year two. It was to stage “The Laramie Project,” Moises Kaufman’s play about the murder of a gay college student, Matthew Shepard. And if Mr. Ostrow thought he might be shocking his bosses with the proposal, then he was soon shocked in return.

Not only did Xavier’s president and headmaster approve the plan for “Laramie,” they informed Mr. Ostrow that he was not exactly breaking new ground. Xavier had performed “Laramie” in the 2002-3 school year, standing by the production even amid some eye-rolling and grumbling among faculty members and parents and a smattering of picketing from fundamentalist Christians.

Last weekend, Mr. Ostrow’s cast performed the play three times to a total of 470 theatergoers. English and religion teachers gave their students extra credit to see “Laramie” and write responses. Parents who had initially quailed about their children being in the show gave standing ovations. Spectators bought hundreds of “Erase Hate” wristbands to benefit the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

Nothing happened, which is a way of saying that everything happened. To use a Sherlock Holmes aphorism, this was the case of the dog that did not bark. The deep significance of Xavier’s production of “Laramie” — of a Catholic school doing a play with an H.I.V.-positive, bar-going gay man as the object of the audience’s empathy — is that it stirred about as much controversy as, say, “Our Town.”

“I’m thrilled we did it,” Jack Raslowsky, Xavier’s president, said in an interview this week. “It’s one of those plays that has the potential to be a springboard to discussion. If you do ‘The Mousetrap’ or ‘Brigadoon,’ you’re not going to be discussing issues of good and evil.”

Such a discussion, said Mr. Raslowsky and Michael LiVigni, the headmaster, fits firmly in the Catholic theological tradition, with its emphases on social justice and human dignity.

“When I saw the play,” Mr. LiVigni said, “what struck me most was the scene of Matthew’s funeral when you have picketers with the sign ‘God Hates You.’ But why would God hate what he created? That’s what I want our boys to understand.”

The Xavier production serves as a kind of marker for all that has and has not changed in the dozen years since Mr. Shepard’s murder. With Congressional efforts to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and a federal court case in California framing same-sex marriage as a civil right, society is moving toward fuller acceptance, if not yet complete equality, for gay citizens.

Photo

Xavier's production of “The Laramie Project,” about the murder of a gay student, had the administration's support.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Yet in the months after Xavier began work on “Laramie,” a series of young gay teenagers across the country committed suicide to escape harassment, and a gay man and two teenagers in the Bronx were held, beaten and tortured in an incident widely likened to the Shepard killing.

The Roman Catholic Church, especially in the United States, has dealt with its own complicated duality on gay issues. On the inclusive side, a 1997 letter by American bishops entitled “Always Our Children” said that homosexuality could not be “considered sinful” and that homosexuals should not be pushed into therapy to try to change them. While calling on homosexuals to remain chaste, the letter maintained, “God does not love someone any less simply because he or she is homosexual.”

On the other flank, however, a 1986 letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, prepared when Pope Benedict was its leader, described homosexuality as a “more or less strong tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil.” And over the years, America’s bishops have formally campaigned against both same-sex marriage and civil unions.

“The debate within the church is whether to view innate attraction to the same sex as a deformity of human nature or as an alternative form of human sexual nature,” said Prof. Lisa Sowle Cahill, a professor of Christian ethics at Boston College. “Statistics show that younger religious people, including Catholics, are more accepting of gay people who are their peers. Nonetheless, in the culture you still see a lot of homophobia and hostility.”

What that means for students like Xavier’s can be distilled to a single, fashionable phrase of derision: “That’s so gay.” Adam Salazar, a 17-year-old senior from Brooklyn, knew it well; he used it often. “If someone was a loser, if someone was weird,” he recalled, “that was the word you used.”

Until reading the script of “Laramie” for his audition, though, Adam had never even heard of Matthew Shepard. He was in kindergarten, after all, the year of the murder. As he was cast last spring and rehearsed all this fall, he kept learning why the Shepard story still mattered.

“I was talking about what the new school play is,” he recalled of a conversation with classmates. “And I said, it’s about this homosexual kid who gets killed. And as soon as I said, ‘homosexual,’ their faces go pale.” He paused. “Just today, I heard a kid call another kid the f-word” — faggot — “because he didn’t give him a high-five.”

Marc Rugani, a religion teacher at Xavier, began discussing the play in his classes weeks before the performances. Initially, he felt the students were reticent “to breach this taboo topic.” After the show, that reluctance has given way to a “better understanding of the magnitude of hate.”

Angel Vicisio, a cast member, put it this way: “I’ve learned we are the generation that has a chance to change this.”

One production, of course, remains one production. Of the 100 licensed student productions of “Laramie” last year, only six or seven took place at religious schools of any faith. As for the tally of student productions of “Grease,” how high can you count?

E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu

A version of this article appears in print on December 18, 2010, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: A Catholic School Meets a Challenge. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe